Critical Essay by Roger Sales

SOURCE: Sales, Roger. “George Crabbe's Reverence for Realism.” In English Literature in History 1780-1830: Pastoral and Politics, pp. 36-51. New York: St. Martin's Press, Inc., 1983.

In the following essay, Sales remarks on Crabbe's reputation for factual representations of society, arguing that the poet actually produced an idealized and elitist view of his community.

Matters Factual

Historians, travailing helpfully on official sources, tend to arrive at the ‘shocking realism’ fallacy. These sources reflect a perspective from above, in which the agricultural labourer is not a person but a problem that needs solving. The full horror of the problem may be shockingly exposed, but it is fallacious to take this approach as the realistic one. It is also dangerous to assume that a poet who shares this de haut en bas perspective is more realistic than...